The Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood (Los Angeles), CA. An Art Deco theater dating from 1930 and host of the Academy Awards from 1949 to 1960. A Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. (Photo: John O'Neill)

The St. George Theatre, which I was involved in going broke running, for one deeply magical year, 1976, had, for the better part of its movie theater life, been the “flagship” of a chain. We knew this, because the back office, where my husband sat making calls to film distributors and being stiffed by booking agents, was called “The District Office.” Those words were actually stenciled in red on the door. Okay, so the 2,672-seat St. George was not actually the flagship of the entire New Jersey-based Fabian chain but “the George” was apparently Fabian’s district hub, beginning in the mid-thirties. Before that time, it had been the central ruby in the metaphorical necklace of another local theater entrepreneur, Solomon Brill, who’d built it on the spot of a splendid copper-domed mansion, torn down in the 1920‘s. Brill sold the theater to Joseph Kohn in 1932 who sold it to Fabian, or so the story goes. .

These days, theater chains may be, like the U.S. Postal Service’s mailboxes, fast becoming a rarity (26 theater chains are listed at MoPix, where once there were hundreds). Many of the original chains bore the names of the great moguls who dreamed the dream of movie palaces in the first place: Sid Grauman, William Fox, Alexander Pantages, Marcus Loew. Some early Vaudeville entrepreneurs, seeing the writing on the wall (or the the shadow on the screen!) began building or accumulating movie theaters early on: Edward Franklin Albee, and B.F. Keith (of Radio Keith Orpheum) come to mind. All of these names live on in theaters they built across the U.S.(still standing and in operation as cinemas or live theaters or both): Grauman’s Chinese/TCL Chinese, Grauman’s Egyptian, the Atlanta Fox, and Fox Oakland come to mind. The Keith-Albee in Huntington, West Virginia bears witness in its name to the blending of Vaudeville and motion pictures and the ultimate dominance of movies. B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee, recent corporate newlyweds via merger, oversaw the construction of this Thomas Lamb theater, under the aegis of Keith-Albee-Orpheum. Formed in January, 1928, KAO, the ultimate Vaudeville circuit for about a half an hour, operated a chain of over 700 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, with more than 15,000 Vaudeville performers, including the recently-signed-but-as-yet-relatively-unknown couple act,"Burns and Allen."

Corporate mergers are, oftener than not, piracy. So it was that in May 1928, five months after KAO was formed, a controlling portion of its stock was sold to the notorious booze-runner and father of a future president, Joseph P. Kennedy. By pre-arrangement, the stock was then purchased in October of that same year by Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as part of the deal that created Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO Pictures).

By 1928, Vaudeville, despite its 15,000 performers, was on the slide and everybody knew it. It would survive for a while in brief and increasingly shabby entertainment interludes on the stages of movie palaces, many of them, like the St. George, built initially for live performance.

The names of the old impresarios — Keith, Albee, Pantages, Fox, Loew — would linger on, obscure as names on neighborhood street signs. 20th Century Fox (which has the surname of a mogul embedded in it), was once a theater-owning entity. But by the time of my childhood, it was, by law, strictly a film corporation. It’s owned, these days, by 21st Century Fox. That’s the 21st Century owning the 20th, and almost nobody knows who Fox was!

Afterthought:I had meant to include in this reflection on names and naming certain latter-day chains, including Mann Theatres (our booking agent at the St. George worked for Mann and for us on the side). Walter Reade was another prominent chain owner, proud of the cleanliness of his movie houses. The briefly-extant Jerry Lewis Cinemas, formed by the comedy star in 1969, is an anomaly. There was nothing like this chain before, and thankfully nothing like it after. Jerry Lewis‘ business plan was a “perfect storm; ” it could be used in business schools worldwide as a classic example of “how not to.” The chain nearly bankrupted Lewis. Suffice it to say, the 1970’s were a terrible time in the U.S. movie business.

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Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.